babble is rabble.ca's discussion board but it's much more than that: it's an online community for folks who just won't shut up. It's a place to tell each other — and the world — what's up with our work and campaigns.

Now with actual results coming in, perhaps the polling wasn't quite right at least as concerns two minor candidates. Marine LePen is doing better than expected and Jean-Luc Melanchon doing less well than expected.

"Socialist presidential challenger Francois Hollande topped the first round of France's presidential election on Sunday with 28.4 percent of votes, while incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy finished second with 25.5 percent, according to exit polls. Exit polls announced at 8 PM showed Marine Le Pen, leader of the far right National Front party had conquered third place with 20%. Far left candidate Jean Luc Melenchon took 11.5 % and centrist Francois Byrou 8.5%, the Ipso polling agency said..."

Jean-Luc Melenchon reaps the rewards of a successful campaign, even if his score can be considered disappointing in terms of polls before the election. It is very far from the third place he was approaching. He immediately called to beat the incumbent. "Our people seem determined to turn the page of the Nicolas Sarkozy years," he said.

The race for third place, meanwhile, seemed to presage a second round that would be tighter than many opinion polls before the vote had suggested. Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front finished with an estimated 19.9 percent, above most recent polls and well ahead of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of the far-left Front de Gauche, who fared far worse than expected with about 11 percent.

Polling agencies gave slightly different early figures, but the same finishing order for the top four candidates.

Voter turnout was about 80 percent of the 44.5 million registered voters, down from the 84 percent who participated in the last presidential ballot five years ago, which was the highest turnout since 1974.

Indeed, Lepenistes are more of a populist free-for-all akin to, I suppose, certain aspects of Ford Nation in Toronto.

And also like Ford Nation (which may explain the higher vote this time), I believe that Marine's been more assiduous than her father in assembling a modernized "grand coalition" on her behalf--including, I guess, a bit of an "anti-immigrant immigrant" demographic around the edges...

I found myself wondering if there was any chance at all that Sarkozy's supporters would have cast "anti-fascist" votes for Hollande if, as could have happened, Ms. Le Pen had made it into the runoff and Sarko had fallen to third(as the Left cast such votes for Chirac against Le Pen's father fourteen years ago).

I'm guessing that, rather than that, the French and American MSM would have suddenly run tons of puff pieces about "the NEW Le Pen"(transforming her into the 1968 Nixon of French politics).

And it was predictable, yet still sickening, that the MSM kept pushing the "Melenchon and Le Pen are BOTH 'Extremists' " meme, as if fighting for the 1981 Common Program of the French Left was no different at all from demonizing immigrants, Muslims(and, covertly yet just barely covertly, demonizing Jews as well). It's sort of like arguing that Gandhi and Rambo BOTH have extreme views about violence.

Melanchon probably lost votes to Le Pen in the end. For some working class voters, class consciousness is nice, but racism is beter.

Hopefully, Le Front Gauche will not respond to this result by embracing aspects of an anti-immigrant program(In the way that the old PCF disgraced itself in the late Seventies by embracing racist rhetoric on immigration).

.... Finally, we have expressed disagreement over the program presented by Jean-Luc Melenchon. In addition to its uncertain funding, we noticed that it recalled, in many respects, the program of the united Left in 1981. This is a moderate criticism in a magazine that welcomed with joy the election of François Mitterrand ... Many of the intentions expressed by Mélenchon are laudable, we wrote, but the 1981 program, whose implementation left some great achievements for the Republic, was also hit, as we know, by serious financial difficulties which forced the then government - which included four Communist ministers, who we recall did not resign - to carry out the austerity "shift to rigour" [in 1983].

We fear that the measures Mélenchon proposes in 2012 would require a leftist government, if implemented, to make the same U-turn. That's all. No insult in this question, no disrespect. A serious and useful debate, at most. But this is obviously what Jean-Luc Melenchon, given his election hubris, does not like.

The way to avoid making such a u-turn is to incorporate extra-parliamentary supporters and activists to defend the mandate for change. If Mitterrand had done that in 1983(just as if Bob Rae had done that in 1993 in Ontario)the great climb down would never have to have happened. What we found out in BOTH situations was that, in the end, neither Mitterrand nor Rae had ANY core convictions whatsoever.

If you settle for just slight change, as Hollande does, you make victory meaningless. Nothing that Mitterrand did after 1983, and nothing his party did after that, mattered. Accepting fiscal conservatism and embracing the cold war meant giving up on doing anything that helped much of anybody. I mean, it's nice that they got rid of the guillotine, but, really, that was a side issue. It didn't help the workers or the poor, and neither did adopting a foreign policy that was even MORE obsessed with fighting the Soviet Union than Reagan's was.

For the first time in more than 30 years, a new French political force - not only to the left of the Socialists, but also unafraid to assert itself as an alternative to them - scored double figures in a presidential election: 11.1%, climbing to 16% in large cities. This achievement of the Front de Gauche (Left Front) represents the most recent and the strongest success of the "other left" in Europe.

After too many years of fragmentation, the Front de Gauche has managed to unify the leftist forces that advocate social and environmental transformation. Now we must make sure that Nicolas Sarkozy is ousted from the Elysée with a crushing defeat in the second round of the presidential election on 6 May. The French people and the labour movement will have a lot to lose if the radicalised right - which, moreover, is after the extreme right's votes - monopolises state power. This is our first and most urgent mission.

But this short-term objective should not be confused in any way with support for the Socialist party's candidate or his programme. François Hollande's policies are designed, with some exceptions, to meet the requirements of financial markets and the "golden" balanced budget rule of the European fiscal pact - which he refuses to put to a popular referendum.

Sarkozy is on course to become the first French president to lose a bid for re-election in more than 30 years, in part because of the sputtering economy. The number of jobless rose for the 11th straight month in March to 2.88 million, up 7.2 percent in a year.

The latest opinion polls, published 10 days before the decisive ballot, suggested Sarkozy's strategy of courting the 6.4 million electors who voted for far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in last Sunday's first round was making scant impact.

The TNS-Sofres poll showed Hollande, who won Sunday's first round ahead of Sarkozy, holding a 10-point lead with 55 percent of voting intentions ahead of their May 6 runoff. A second survey by pollster CSA showed the Socialist ahead on 54 percent to Sarkozy's 46.

"All the conditions are there for a win... The momentum is with us," Hollande, who has struck an increasingly presidential tone since the first round, told France 2 television.

"The outgoing president had said that he would be judged on unemployment, and he will be. He promised to cut unemployment to 5 percent and it is at 10."

"..Every candidate except Sarkozy, the self-styled centrist Bayrou and the Green candidate Eva Joly singled out the world of finance as the main adversary. Hollande did so quite explicitly in his main campaign speech, although shortly afterwards he watered his wine considerably during a visit to London, the City oblige.

This hostility towards banks has horrified Anglo-American commentators, from the Economist to John Vinocur of the International Herald Tribune, for whom realism consists in docile obedience to the demands of 'the markets'. Acting uppity toward finance capital is close to insanity. If 'the right' is defined first of all by subservience to finance capital, [all Canadian pols!] then aside from Sarkozy, Bayrou and perhaps Joly, all the other candidates were basically on the Left. And all of them except Sarkozy would be considered far to the left of any leading politician in the United States.

This applies notably to Marine Le Pen, whose social program was designed to win working class and youth votes. Marine Le Pen condemns the euro as a failure which has wrecked European economies and is doomed to disappear..."

"In the first and only televised debate ahead of Sunday's vote, incumbent French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist rival Francois Hollande traded barbs as they faced off on a number of issues ranging from economic policies to immigration. It was billed as 'The Final Confrontation' and that's exactly what millions of TV viewers across France got Wednesday night as incumbent French President Nicolas Sarkozy squared off against his Socialist challenger, Francois Hollande, in an intensely contested face-off, the only debate of the 2012 campaign.."